SUSE gets closer to Huawei, SAP

Kathy Gibson at SUSEcon, Prague – SUSE will today announce new partnerships with Huawei and SAP.

Partnering is key to providing enterprise users with complete solutions, and SUSE is extending its ecosystem with these new technology alliances.

The company that stands alone will battle to succeed, says Michael Miller, president: strategy, alliances and marketing at SUSE. “Partnering is about having interconnected ecosystems where partners work together to provide complete solutions to the market.”

The new partnership with Huawei, aimed at providing mission critical servers for SAP applications, builds on a long-standing relationship with the Chinese vendor, Miller adds. “We originally worked together in the telecommunications space, where SUSE was the operating system of choice for Huawei’s telco devices.

“So when Huawei entered the enterprise market it made sense to work with them there as well.”

Going mission-critical with Huawei

Today’s announcement is for the development of an optimised platform for running big in-memory SAP workloads. “Huawei really wants to be the platform of choice for these workloads,” Miller says. “Since SUSE is already optimised for SAP, and we already work with Huawei, the new agreement was a natural move.”

Huawei and SUSE will collaborate to build a more reliable mission-critical server that supports memory module hot swap, which will help customers slash unplanned maintenance time while keeping their production systems up and running.

SUSE’s enterprise Linux expertise delivers reliability, availability and scalability (RAS) for the x86 platform. The version of Linux Enterprise Server running on KunLun builds on the SUSE enterprise-class Linux OS kernels and synergises with the bottom-layer firmware provided by KunLun. This combination enables efficient co-ordination between the Linux kernel ACPI driver module, the memory hot swap module, and the kernel memory management subsystem.

In addition, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server works with the optimised KunLun BIOS process, creating a highly automated, reliable hot swap solution secured from kernels all the way through to user-mode tools. This will allow users of validated applications to physically add or remove core components such as memory modules online without shutting down the system.

The Huawei KunLun Mission Critical Server is specifically engineered for critical workloads such as enterprise database, decision support, and business processing. Supporting 8, 16, or 32 Intel processors with up to 32Tb in-memory computing, the KunLun server is capable of processing massive amounts of data even in large-scale in-memory database systems.

“Huawei is teaming up with SUSE to jointly launch the in-memory computing hot swap solution built on the Huawei 16-/32-socket KunLun Mission Critical Server and the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server RAS enhanced feature package,” says Qiu Long, president of the Huawei IT Server Product Line.

Ralf Flaxa, president: engineering at SUSE, comments: “SUSE values our joint innovation with Huawei. Having support and coordination from the bottom-layer hardware structural design and BIOS software sides is integral to SUSE’s innovations around the OS RAS features.

“The appliance based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server RAS enhanced feature package and the Huawei KunLun Mission Critical Server embodies the results of our joint innovation, and it will deliver unparalleled reliability to large enterprise customers.”

SUSE OpenStack to power SAP

Meanwhile, the new collaboration agreement with SAP will see SUSE OpenStack Cloud and SUSE Enterprise Storage become key elements in driving the SAP Cloud Platform.

SUSE will provide robust, enterprise-grade infrastructure services for running applications that allow businesses to collect, manage, analyze and leverage information of all types; and to extend and connect to business systems.

The SAP Cloud Platform is an agile platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for digital transformation, with comprehensive application development services and capabilities that allow businesses to collect, manage, analyze and leverage information of all types, to extend and connect to business systems, and to innovate new edge scenarios to allow businesses to continuously adapt and advance.

It enables customers to achieve business agility, create a truly integrated and optimised enterprise, and accelerate digital transformation across the business – all without the requirement of maintaining or investing in on-premises infrastructure.

SUSE OpenStack Cloud is an automated cloud computing platform that helps enable organizations to rapidly deploy and easily manage highly available, mixed-hypervisor private clouds. The latest version is based on the OpenStack Newton release.

SUSE Enterprise Storage is an intelligent software-defined storage management solution, powered by Ceph technology. It enables IT to transform their enterprise storage infrastructure to seamlessly adapt to changing business and data demands by delivering cost-efficient, highly scalable and resilient storage using commodity off-the-shelf servers and disk drives.

“Our shared roots run deep, as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications has long been a leading platform for SAP solutions on Linux. Today, SUSE also collaborates with SAP within the Cloud Foundry Foundation and shares a vision for the convergence of Kubernetes, containers and Cloud Foundry technologies. Through it all, SUSE’s mission is to continue to be the best platform and open source technology provider for running SAP applications, services and workloads.”

Björn Goerke, SAP’s chief technology officer and president: SAP Cloud Platform, adds: “SAP has been working with SUSE to solve IT infrastructure challenges for more than 18 years. We are excited that SAP Cloud Platform in SAP data centres now leverages SUSE’s reliable and high-performing open source solutions for managing and deploying virtual machines, as well as storing and managing critical enterprise data.”

In a separate announcement, SUSE will add support for takeover automation for scale-out clusters in SAP HANA.

This means that SUSE with provide automated takeover for users and applications, complementing the SAP HANA platform and data replication between SAP HANA nodes (scale-up) and clusters (scale-out).

The new offering is part of a leading platform for SAP solutions, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.

Certification for high availability clusters and improved maintenance for SAP NetWeaver 7.40 – SAP has certified SUSE technology to manage high availability clusters running on the SAP NetWeaver technology platform. This enables transparent rolling updates of the SAP NetWeaver kernel.

SUSE now also supports SAP NetWeaver 7.40 and above, included in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.